Tag Archives: Society of Physics Students

This article by Dwight E. Neuenschwander, a professor in the Physics Department at Southern Nazarene University appears to have been published in the SPS Observer, the quarterly magazine of the Society of Physics Students (SPS) published by SPS and the American Institute of Physics (AIP). No publication date is given, but the article is currently hosted on the SPS Observer web site, which also hosts issues back to 2002, but no way to search them for a particular article or topic.

In any case, Prof. Neuenschwander makes the astounding claim that simply leaning a motorcycle will make the entire motorcycle precess in the direction of the lean:

If you lean to the left, the motorcycle turns left (likewise on bicycles). Why is this so? … This induces a nonzero torque … Hence the angular momentum vector L rotates about a vertical axis, and the motorcycle precesses to my left.

Not just the front wheel precesses, but the whole motorcycle. No mention is made of steer angle, steer torque, or even friction between the tires and pavement. The whole bikes just yaws by the magic of gyroscopes!

Of course, no such thing happens. Instead, there are two possibilities. Either the front wheel is free to precess about the steering axis, does so to steer in the direction of the lean, and the friction between the tires and the pavement generate a yawing moment on the bike. Or the front wheel is not free to precess and the roll moment generated about the contact patches by the force of gravity acting on the center of mass simply causes the bike to roll until it strikes the pavement. Gyroscopes are not magic after all.

Near the end of the article, Prof. Neuenschwander writes

Hmmm… further research is needed….

We don’t need any further research like this. What is really needed, instead, is reading up on the topic before writing about it. Sharp’s seminal paper on the Stability and Control of Motorcycles has been available since 1971, so the information is out there.